“Made a big strike, I hear.”

“Yea-ah.  About $25,000, they say.  Might be a million, the way the female critters run,” Ted laughed, as the hurdy-gurdy girls with shrieks of laughter pounced upon the noisy newcomer.

“Well, hel-lo, Nance, and Liz, and Babe, and Bouncin’ Bet, old gal!  All ready to help me sling it, ain’t you?  But where’s little pale Alice?”

“Oh, Allie?  She’s back in the tents.  Sick tonight.  Awful bad, she’s took.  She’ll be shufflin’ off ‘fore long, an’ rid o’ mortal misery.”

“Poor little soldier!”

“Sweet, she was, an’ born to be good.  Why, I remember (we came ’round the Horn on the same sailin’ vessel) that they wasn’t a ailin’ baby on board but what Allie could get a smile out of it, nor a sick soul that didn’t bless ’er for ‘er kindness an’ care.  Sick o’ body, sick o’ heart, Allie did for ’em all, bless ’er.”

“She was happy, then,” put in Babe.

“Yes.  Comin’ out to Californy to ’er lover, she were, all her folks back in the States bein’ dead.  She’d took care of ’er mother, last.  ’Twas why ‘er man came on ahead.  An’ when she got here — "

“Aw-w, Bet, don’t you cry,” said Babe.  “Y’ see, when we got here, Curly, we found her boy’d been shot in a fight over a mine.  Allie, she hadn’t no money left, and no gumption much, like Bet an’ me, to fight her way, so we took ‘er along o’ us.  We tried to keep her the little lady that she was, but — Well, we got snowed in last winter up on the divide an’ — Faro Sam — Well, it broke her pure heart, an’ most Bet’s an’ mine, too.  An’ she ain’t never got over the cold she took, up there in the snow.”

“Life’s hard for a girl anyways you put it, an’ she’ll be happier over the river where there ain’t no cold nor sorrer.  Bet!  Aw-w, she’ll sleep on a finer bed nor you an’ I could give ‘er, an’ wake happy, with ever’one she loved best around her.  She’s layin’ there so white an’ small an’ still it’d most break your hear to see ’er.  Like a little snowdrop you’ve picked, an’ worn, an’ slung away.  So gentle — "

“Well, what’s this, anyway?  A wake?” broke in Faro Sam’s icy voice.  “Do I hire fiddlers to play a funeral dirge?  Get on with you,” scattering the girls in the direction of the card tables and the dancing platform.  “Which ones do you want, Curly?”

“I want Babe and Betsy.  Where’s that little pale printer’s devil, the one they call the gambler’s ghost?  I know Sam won’t let you girls leave here.”

“He’s workin’ up on the paper, I guess.  They ran out of coal oil and had to fire up with pine knots.”

“He’s comin, now.  He ain’t no gambler’s ghost tonight, though; he’s pot black!”

“Ghost,” said Curly, “you take this around to Allie.”  It was a $50 octagonal slug.

“Yessir.”

“And you say that there’s more, all she wants, where that comes from.”

“Yessir.”

Then, shaking his mop of brown, curly hair as though to relieve his head of a burden, he took the girls for what he felt was a much-needed round of drinks.